Category: Quick Hits

From the Associated Press:

Mary Power is 92 and worried about surviving another frigid New England winter. Deep cuts in federal home heating assistance benefits mean she probably can't afford enough heating oil to stay warm.

She lives in a drafty trailer in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood and gets by on $11,148 a year in pension and Social Security benefits. Her heating aid help this year will drop from $1,035 to $685. With rising heating oil prices, it probably will cost her more than $3,000 for enough oil to keep warm unless she turns her thermostat down to 60 degrees, as she plans.

"I will just have to crawl into bed with the covers over me and stay there," said Power, a widow who worked as a cashier and waitress until she was 80.

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"I will do what I have to do."

Thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

"They're playing Russian roulette with people's lives," said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts.

The issue could flare just as New Hampshire votes in the Republican presidential primary.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she hopes the candidates will take up the region's heating aid crunch because it underscores how badly the country needs a comprehensive energy policy.

Several Northeast states already have reduced heating aid benefits to families as Congress considers cutting more than $1 billion from last year's $4.7 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that served nearly 9 million households.

The first thing that comes to mind: thank god the Pentagon's trillion dollars weren't affected.

The second thing: I thought turning the thermostat down to 60 was just something one does when winter arrives.
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Are there people in this country who can actually afford the luxury of not being balls cold in their own home for the entirety of winter? If I had my thermostat set to a reasonably warm temperature my electric bill would be about $600/month.

And that brings me to the third thing: I have electric heat and the subject of this news item lives in one of the many older homes in the northeast with oil heat.

These are two of the least efficient, most expensive ways to heat a home. The percentage of homes in this country with badly antiquated heating/cooling systems must contribute mightily to the vast amount of energy resources we consume in this country.
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We tend to focus inordinately on cars and our consumption of gasoline, but something tells me that making sure homes and shared buildings have heating systems that post-date the Industrial Revolution would accomplish nearly as much to "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" and other energy-related buzzwords.

But I'm overlooking the most obvious aspect of this story. Namely, the ongoing quest to figure out what in the holy hell is wrong with us as a country.

A quick follow-up to yesterday's post on education "reform" – a WaPo column on the relevance of standardized tests through the eyes of an adult school board member who (rather boldly) agreed to take the test and publicize his results. On the one hand, I have a hard time taking seriously his "I've never had to do math in real life, so why should kids learn it?

" argument, which is both explicit and implicit here. On the other hand, it makes you wonder what the average school board member (or Concerned Parent, for that matter) would get on their kids' standardized tests.

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I used to enjoy giving my intro classes the basic test immigrants are required to take in order to obtain U.S. citizenship. The results were…not pretty. "But no one needs to know this stuff!" was a common protest, but they somehow avoided linking that response to the question of why the test should be required of immigrants in that case.

Since 2001 there has been a marked increase in the number of man-made social and political Crises threatening Americans, from terrorism to possible global pandemics to economic collapse to peak oil to the erosion of individual rights. It's tiring, spending as much time as we have been asked to spend terrified and fending off imminent doom.

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Accordingly I have tried hard to maintain a more even keel than Young Ed used to, resisting the urge to leap to attention as though the sky is falling every time a perceived threat or crisis appears on the horizon.

Forget all of that for a second. The sky is now falling. This is the end of the world as we know it: for-profit "education reform advocates" (lobbyists/privatization fetishists) are convincing legislatures to legalize "virtual charter schools". You might know these better as online courses. You know, those things that students learn absolutely nothing from. But you can't beat 'em for cheap overhead!

Read that link. We are so, so very fucked.

One of the most interesting differences between liberals and conservatives, in my anecdotal experience, is the zeal conservatives have for re-litigating the past and attempting to rehabilitate the character of their most visible failures. Note, for example, the consistent efforts to rewrite the history of the New Deal (see: uberhack Amity Shlaes' recent garbage), Ann Coulter's "Joe McCarthy wasn't so bad after all!" crap, or Victor Davis Hanson's decades-long effort to make Curtis LeMay a figure of respect instead of a template for movie villains. There seems to be a different level of emphasis on…letting it go, so to speak.

The return on investment for this strategy seems remarkably low. The amount of effort required to create a new hero (Palin, Bachmann, Paul Ryan, etc.) is vastly lower than what is required to rewrite history, and the latter usually fails anyway. So of all the figures who could be praised in an effort to rehabilitate their reputation, I'm not sure why the comedy geniuses at the Von Mises Institute decided to start with Scrooge.
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Yes, the fictional character. The villain. The figure whose name has become synonymous with penury, greed, and the inhumanity of industrialized capitalism. Ebenezer Scrooge.

This deserves a full-scale FJMing like few things I've ever seen, but it's simply too long and too stupid to fit into my currently hectic schedule. Look at just a few of the things we learn in this opus, "In Defense of Scrooge":

So let's look without preconceptions at Scrooge's allegedly underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit. The fact is, if Cratchit's skills were worth more to anyone than the fifteen shillings Scrooge pays him weekly, there would be someone glad to offer it to him. Since no one has, and since Cratchit's profit-maximizing boss is hardly a man to pay for nothing, Cratchit must be worth exactly his present wages.

No doubt Cratchit needs—i.e., wants—more, to support his family and care for Tiny Tim. But Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of Cratchit's misjudgment?

As for that one lump of coal Scrooge allows him, it bears emphasis that Cratchit has not been chained to his chilly desk. If he stays there, he shows by his behavior that he prefers his present wages-plus-comfort package to any other he has found, or supposes himself likely to find. Actions speak louder than grumbling, and the reader can hardly complain about what Cratchit evidently finds satisfactory.

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I…I don't even know where to start with this. Just remember that you can't be underpaid if the inerrant free market has determined your salary (laugh along for a moment and pretend that's what actually happened here).

Scrooge's first employer, good old Fezziwig, was a lot freer with a guinea—he throws his employees a Christmas party. What the Ghost of Christmas Past does not explain is how Fezziwig afforded it. Did he attempt to pass the added costs to his customers? Or did young Scrooge pay for it anyway by working for marginally lower wages?

Yeah.

The biggest of the Big Lies about Scrooge is the pointlessness of his pursuit of money. "Wealth is of no use to him. He doesn't do any good with it," opines ruddy nephew Fred.

Wrong on both counts. Scrooge apparently lends money, and to discover the good he does one need only inquire of the borrowers.

Lending money is an act of kindness.
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And then, most of all:

Dickens doesn't mention Scrooge's satisfied customers, but there must have been plenty of them for Scrooge to have gotten so rich.

Yep, that's how one gets rich in a Free Market: by merit. By pleasing customers.

The Von Mises Institute: Blending glibertarian fantasy and reality since 1982.

So far I've avoided the Penn State child molestation story and the new, less widely reported allegations that a Syracuse University basketball coach Bernie Fine (who was fired on Monday) molested young boys as well. In the latter case, ESPN had a legally recorded tape of a phone conversation between a victim and the coach's wife in which they indicate mutual knowledge of the various acts of molestation that occurred. In a disturbing similarity to the Penn State case, ESPN received the tape in 2003 (!!!!) and reported it only this past weekend because they thought that the victim had already called the police and couldn't "verify the authenticity" of the tape.

Seems like that might have been worth taking to the authorities anyway, guys. But let's not digress.

One particular part of the conversation between wife and victim is noteworthy in ESPN's partial transcript:

On the call, Laurie Fine told Davis (the victim) she'd already warned her husband that one day his alleged molestation of Davis might become public.

"I said to him, 'Bobby and I talked, and I know some things about you that if you keep pushing are going to be let out.' "

Davis continued: "He doesn't think he can be touched … "

Laurie Fine: "No … he thinks he's above the law."

The idea of being untouchable is prominent throughout the events at Penn State as well – that being a coach at a big time college sports program provides lofty social status. Honestly, that is a sadder commentary on our society, and higher education in particular, than even the acts these men committed. None of us are naive enough to deny that people in positions of power are treated differently.

Things they do that might get them in trouble can sometimes be swept under rugs because other powerful people will help them. This is part of the way the world works. Life isn't fair, etc.

What's pathetic is that assistant coaches at college sports programs fall into this category of social elites who wield special powers.

It makes sense, for example, that the governor or a judge or a billionaire are likely to get Special Treatment from the law.

They have actual power. Bernie Fine or Jerry Sandusky, conversely, are college assistant coaches. College sports could cease to exist tomorrow and the collective impact on society would be nil, other than adding more people to the unemployment rolls. What these men do is not important. At all. It might be fun. It might be entertaining. It might boost school spirit or whatever excuses athletic departments use to justify their existence. Sure. But college football and basketball are not important.

It's sad that we place such a disproportionate emphasis on sports and athletes in our society that these men can get out of a speeding ticket let alone avoid prosecution for felonies.

The appropriate response to a statement such as "Well I'm a coach for Penn State!" would ideally be "Who gives a shit?" Instead, such people are treated with deference once reserved for heads of state and robber barons.

Because, like, the Nittany Lions! Joe Paterno! OMG!

Oh, by the way: don't get all high and mighty on us, non-Americans. We've seen how you treat your soccer players.

This Thanksgiving, will you be part of the problem or part of the solution? The problem, of course, is the stealth Islamofascistication of America.

Can even Thanksgiving, that most secular of holidays, be part of America's inexorable slouch toward Sharia Law? According to Pammy Gellar (on the wildly misnamed "American Thinker") it sure the fuck is:

In my book Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance, I report at length on the meat industry's halal scandal: its established practice of not separating halal meat from non-halal meat, and not labeling halal meat as such. And back in October 2010, I reported more little-noted but explosive new revelations: that much of the meat in Europe and the United States is being processed as halal without the knowledge of the non-Muslim consumers who buy it.

I discovered that only two plants in the U.S. that perform halal slaughter keep the halal meat separated from the non-halal meat, and they only do so because plant managers thought it was right to do so. At other meat-packing plants, animals are slaughtered following halal requirements, but then only a small bit of the meat is actually labeled halal.

Now here is yet more poisonous fruit of that scandal.
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A citizen activist and reader of my website AtlasShrugs.com wrote to Butterball, one of the most popular producers of Thanksgiving turkeys in the United States, asking them if their turkeys were halal. Wendy Howze, a Butterball Consumer Response Representative, responded: "Our whole turkeys are certified halal."

In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a torturous method: Islamic slaughter.

Umm…what?

Non-Muslims in America and Europe don't deserve to have halal turkey forced upon them in this way, without their knowledge or consent.

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So this Thanksgiving, fight for your freedom. Find a non-halal, non-Butterball turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving this Thursday. And write to Butterball and request, politely but firmly, that they stop selling only halal turkeys, and make non-halal turkeys available to Americans who still value our freedoms.

It's abundantly clear that Pamela Gellar is seriously mentally ill, and her story is going to end in one of two ways: heavily sedated in a mental institution or bleeding out in a hail of police gunfire after her shooting rampage in a crowded mosque.

This year I am thankful that I am not as stupid as the people who come up with these idiotic conspiracies.
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Alabama's new toughest-in-the-land immigration law, modeled after but more demanding than the highly publicized law in Arizona, is a comedian's dream.
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The idea that there is a big problem with people trying to get INTO Alabama is always good for a few laughs.
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Nonetheless the law has real world consequences, some of which were unintended.

Back during my high school years, circa 1994-95, Alabama made headlines by literally greasing up its own cornhole, bending over, and grabbing its ankles for Mercedes-Benz when the German automaker decided to open its first U.S. factory. No tax break was too lavish and no assurance of a docile, authority-worshipping workforce was too strong for the political and economic leaders of a state whose primary industries are teen pregnancy and Rickets. It worked, much to the dismay of other states, initiating the now common practice of wooing potential employers with buckets of money and other special favors. That tangent aside, M-B is now one of Alabama's most important employers, if not the most.

So imagine the hilarity that ensued when the new law resulted in the arrest and detention of a white collar M-B manager, a German legal resident driving without his passport or German drivers license. Governor Robert Bentley, who signed the bill into law, apparently started making phone calls to state immigration officials when he heard about the arrest (which I'm sure the Governor does in every case, seeing as how our justice system treats everyone equally).
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The man was released when his German license and passport were brought to the jail, but you can bet that Gov. Bentley and the State Leguslature will be ordering extra lip balm and mints for some enthusiastic ass kissing and pole smoking of the M-B higher ups in the near future.

Hilariously, due to such "unintended consequences" the Governor is considering some, ahem, revisions to the law. The nation – nay, the world – waits breathlessly to see how they will try to re-word the law so that wealthy, white collar German executives are spared further embarrassment. Knowing Alabama's track record, my guess is that words like "greasy" and "brown" will be added to the law to ensure its effectiveness against the targeted population without causing any collateral damage among the mighty Job Creator class.

With so many Americans in poverty in the 2010 Census, the government is working to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty including income inequality, unemployment, and outsourcing.

No, I'm kidding. They're just going to change the definition of poverty. That will conveniently eliminate half of the rise in poverty since 2006….
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…by counting safety-net programs that "have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship."

This is nothing more than a shell game: changing the metric by which poverty is measured in order to say that there aren't as many poor people. Whenever you reset any previously arbitrary measure to a new arbitrary measure, it becomes difficult if not impossible to judge progress over a long time.
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More importantly, counting money and other aid given to the poor as a part of the measure of whether or not they are poor sort of misses the point that if they didn't have those programs, they would, indeed be poor.
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This is all academic, of course, since no one is really poor anyway. How can you be poor if you have a cell phone?